Star Ship Polaris

Okay, I rebuilt the fubar'd interior surface of the sails, only this time I managed to do it with about 15,000 fewer polygons! Current total poly count for the entire model stands at 479,200, so it looks like I'm coming in under the half-million mark after all.

I also finished off the slots and panel lines in the trailing edges of the aft ring fins, added back the hinged panels over the forward Nielsen generators, and cleaned up and renamed about 300 objects. Tomorrow I'm going to finish off a few remaining details and see if I can't get the rest of the objects properly organized.

Without further ado, here's another batch of near-complete WIP images:

I'll be delivering the model to Dennis by tomorrow, for sure this time. I've already tested the OBJ conversion and it appears to be working properly again. It's possible I may send some updates to a couple of parts and pieces later, but I'm not going to delay any further on sending the model as a whole.

I'm hoping we can finish converting it and start rendering before December.

The more I look at Vektor's shots the less interested I am in clotting it up with a lot of mapped detail - some plating and weathering, but not much. So much specificity of detail is built into the mesh that if we can develop good procedural textures comparable to his for purposes of specular highlighting, etc. that'll be good.

Some details can be done with textures and others can't, at least not very well. I modeled the panel lines, for example, because they usually don't look very good textured unless you use some VERY large maps. On the other hand, I did the hex pattern on the sails as a texture map because it would have added a ridiculous amount of polys to model it and it wouldn't have looked much different.

What I would mainly like to see for the texturing pass is some weathering and general wear and tear. This ship doesn't need heavy aztec patterns or hull rivets and whatnot, it just needs to look like it's not so fresh off the lot. I was even going to add some battle damage, some patched hull plating, torn or warped surfaces in a few places, but I've simply run out of time for that.

If I get the chance, I'm still going to do some paintovers of a few areas just to show what I had in mind, but that's all pretty much in Dennis' hands at this point.